18 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Women Painting Women: Gender, Modernism and Feminine Art, c.1910-1930
No full textThis chapter examines the work of women artists working in Paris during the period 1910-1930. It focuses on the work of several artists working on the fringes of modernist groups and whose works were widely exhibited and reviewed at the time. The author explores the critical culture through which their work was represented and some contemporary perceptions of femininity involved. She argues that a lack of historical material and limited access to relevant works by these artists has encouraged misrepresntation of the complex relationships which many women negotiated with avan-garde groups and artistic styles
The New Managerial Challenge: Transforming Environmental and Health Issues to Competitive Advantages
No full textThe major aim of the paper is to investigate how environmental (“green”) factors may influence on international business activities and the competitiveness of firms. The paper suggests that an environmental performance lower than the industry average would represent a risk for the firm, while a performance above the industry average could result in increased cost and/or increased competitiveness. Further, it is suggested that the average environmental performance in most industries will improve, due to a situation where most firms attempt to perform better than or equal to their industry’s average levels. The author present twelve specific recommendations for managers, aimed at improving firm competitiveness in international markets
Global REACH?: The Potential International Impact of EU Chemicals Regulation
No full textThe central question of this paper is: Could the new EU chemicals regulation REACH play a role in international chemicals governance – and if so, how? The REACH
Regulation is one of the largest and most controversial pieces of legislation that the EU has ever adopted. It introduces a comprehensive and ambitious system for
chemicals management, which moves away from a hazard-based approach toward a more risk-based approach. Furthermore, REACH introduces increased responsibilities for private actors and aims at encouraging more innovation. These
new EU rules for the management of chemical substances are more comprehensive and more ambitious than current efforts at the international level. Therefore, this paper argues that there could be a mutual supplementation of international chemicals initiatives and REACH. On the one hand, REACH could complement international activities through the diffusion of its ambitious requirements and the
data that it will produce. Diffusion could potentially happen faster than the international negotiation procedures and create facts that facilitate consensus finding
for ensuing international agreement. Policy diffusion could also potentially reach a very broad scope of countries, including jurisdictions that are not part of current
international agreements. On the other hand, international organisations could foster and enhance the diffusion process and institutionalise some of the REACH provisions. Furthermore, international agreements play an important role in taking particular account of the situation of developing countries and in providing a certain ‘baseline’ degree of safe international chemicals management. This paper first introduces the main features of the REACH Regulation. Then, it describes the international system of chemicals governance before discussing the contribution that REACH could make to this system. In the subsequent section, the different ways in which REACH requirements could diffuse to other jurisdictions and benefit international governance are analysed. These conceptual considerations are then applied to the US and California in a brief discussion of first signs of the potential influence of REACH. Since the REACH Regulation only entered into force on 1 June 2007 and will only be fully implemented by 2016, the full international impact of REACH will only become clear at a future point in time
Framework for Experimental Learning: Replicable Business Models in Rural Electrification
No full textLack of access to electricity is a significant hindrance to boost economic development, knowledge creation and health improvement in developing countries, specifically for people in rural areas. Even though governments play a key role in building infrastructure, they do not have the capacity or the financing to fulfill these needs. Thus entrepreneurs play a vital role by introducing solutions for electricity based on renewable energy. They are able to perceive the risk, willing to take it and able to develop customized functional solutions that also are based on sustainable business models. In this paper, the author does multiple case studies and the theoretical backbone consists of literature about business models, business model innovation, replication and literature describing the challenges in the context of bottom of the pyramid markets in developing countries. Based on the findings, the author has developed a conceptual framework for experimental learning, which clarifies the business model innovation process to enable replication in the context of rural electrification by community-level mini-utilities. Divided into two phases, the framework first describes the learning process and how the process of accumulating knowledge about the Arrow Core and developing rules are best conducted. It recommends a linear but iterative process, where the firm enters one village at the time and develops the needed sustainable local business model for each specific village. In doing so it accumulates knowledge both about the business model and the context, which it can then exploit to build a larger company through replication in the second phase. The contributions are twofold: the author first suggests a more dynamic approach than the existing business model innovation literature by developing a step-wise conceptual model. Second, this model has practical implications for entrepreneurs, describing the process that can be used in their own commercialization efforts
Framework for Experimental Learning: Replicable Business Models in Rural Electrification
No full textLack of access to electricity is a significant hindrance to boost economic development, knowledge creation and health improvement in developing countries, specifically for people in rural areas. Even though governments play a key role in building infrastructure, they do not have the capacity or the financing to fulfill these needs. Thus entrepreneurs play a vital role by introducing solutions for electricity based on renewable energy. They are able to perceive the risk, willing to take it and able to develop customized functional solutions that also are based on sustainable business models. In this paper, the author does multiple case studies and the theoretical backbone consists of literature about business models, business model innovation, replication and literature describing the challenges in the context of bottom of the pyramid markets in developing countries. Based on the findings, the author has developed a conceptual framework for experimental learning, which clarifies the business model innovation process to enable replication in the context of rural electrification by community-level mini-utilities. Divided into two phases, the framework first describes the learning process and how the process of accumulating knowledge about the Arrow Core and developing rules are best conducted. It recommends a linear but iterative process, where the firm enters one village at the time and develops the needed sustainable local business model for each specific village. In doing so it accumulates knowledge both about the business model and the context, which it can then exploit to build a larger company through replication in the second phase. The contributions are twofold: the author first suggests a more dynamic approach than the existing business model innovation literature by developing a step-wise conceptual model. Second, this model has practical implications for entrepreneurs, describing the process that can be used in their own commercialization efforts
Do Slotting Allowances Harm Retail Competition?
No full textSlotting allowances are fees paid by manufacturers to get access to retailers’ shelf space. Both in the USA and Europe, the use of slotting allowances has attracted attention in the general press as well as among policy makers and economists. One school of thought claims that slotting allowances are efficiency enhancing, while another school of thought maintains that slotting allowances are used in an anti-competitive manner. In this paper, we argue that this controversy is partially caused by inadequate assumptions of how the retail market is structured and organized. Using a formal model, we show that there are good reasons to expect anti-competitive effects of slotting allowances. We further point out that competition authorities tend to use an unsatisfactory basis for comparison when analyzing welfare consequences of slotting allowances.slotting allowances, retail competition, anti-trust policy
A critical and empirical analysis of the national-local ‘gap’ in public responses to large-scale energy infrastructures
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this recordA national-local ‘gap’ is often used as the starting point for analyses of public responses to large scale energy infrastructures. We critique three assumptions found in that literature: the public's positive attitudes, without further examining other type of perceptions at a national level; that local perceptions are best examined through a siting rather than place-based approach; that a gap exists between national and local responses, despite a non-correspondence in how these are examined. Survey research conducted at national and local levels about electricity transmission lines in the UK confirm these criticisms. Results do not support a gap between national and local levels; instead, both differences and similarities were found. Results show the value of adopting a place-based approach and the role of surveys to inform policy making are discussed.This research was supported by the Research Council of Norway (SusGrid Grant No. 207774) and
the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (FlexNet: EP/EO4011X/1). The authors
would also like to acknowledge the beneficial comments and advice of their colleagues at the
Environment and Sustainability Research Group, Geography, University of Exeter, regarding previous
versions of this paper, as well as the helpful comments of the three anonymous reviewers that
commented on it. Thanks are also due to colleagues from the SusGrid project, specifically Audun
Ruud and Oystein Aas, and the participants in the research, for their contributions to this paper
Author Correction: Comprehensive analysis of chromothripsis in 2,658 human cancers using whole-genome sequencing
No full textauthor correctio
Introduction—ancient network societies
No full text© Øystein S. LaBianca, Sandra Arnold Scham and contributors 2006. All rights reserved. Thus did Manuel Castells end the final volume of his masterwork The Rise of the Network Society. As we edit this volume, during what seems to be a dawning of a new phase of globalization where the initial promise of solidifying human bonds throughout the world seems to have been replaced by the wide and rapid dissemination of destructive technology, the ‘dream of the enlightenment’ seems more elusive than ever. Western politicians and political writers assure us that technology is still the key-the more ‘connected’ societies are, according to a recent interview with Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College, the less danger they pose to world peace. He goes on to say, ‘Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder.’ This is what he calls the ‘new security paradigm that shapes this age’ (Barnett 2004). Disregarding the implication in this pronouncement that world peace is synonymous with online banking, there is, in fact, some comfort to be gained from the knowledge that the ties that bind societies together, which postmodernists have been wont to dismiss as Western hegemonic control, can augur well for global stability. It is also obvious that Barnett, whether he acknowledges the debt or not, has been strongly influenced by Castells-who may well become the most imitated and unwittingly referenced theorist of the millennium. Is this, however, a ‘new’ paradigm, as Barnett suggests, or do those who have a sense of déjà vu about these ideas, stretching back to the first historical imperialist enterprises, have a valid point? The answers to this query are as varied as the disciplines that have been strongly influenced by Castells’ work. Communications specialists and students of modern politics and international affairs will inevitably stress the essential modernism of The Network Society and argue that adding the dimension of the past to Castells’ body of theory, would unnecessarily obfuscate some of the author’s essential premises. His work is, after all, meant to be uber-historical and so firmly rooted in postmodernity and the information technology revolution that it appears to exist beyond time as well as physical space. Further, throughout the three volumes, the author suggests that each phenomenon he describes in such detail is distinct from anything that might have gone before. Nevertheless, students of the past including historians, archaeologists, social anthropologists and political scientists who take the long view tend to agree with the writer of Ecclesiastes that ‘there isnothing new under the sun’—or, rather, human phenomena remain more constant than the terms used to describe them. Networks dependent upon new technology, identity versus collectivization issues and globalization itself, they would argue, are features of many ancient and historical civilizations. Those of us who work in these disciplines can hasten to assure Castells that, while his theoretical framework is wholly innovative, the trends he explicates are quite typical of cultures and societies from previous millennia. On a smaller scale, for example, Castells’ ‘space of flows’, the non-substantial dimension in which information is transmitted and transactions conducted without physical proximity, was prefigured by trade networks that may have begun as far back as human prehistory. With the exchange of goods came an exchange of ideas that often moved far beyond the areas or regions of the world where the physical exchanges took place. The ‘ripple effect’ of these exchanges is just beginning to be known to students of the past. Certainly, technology can facilitate such networks but the technology in this case may amount to something as simple as the domestication of pack animals. The ‘space of flows’ is not established by mere technology, however, and important influences can be transmitted across cultural and physical boundaries-expanding and redefining the ‘territory’ of human contact. This phenomenon can be mapped in physical space but physical space is not its boundary. Ancient empires were the original globalizing forces along with the spread of the world’s great religious traditions. So powerful were some of these institutions that they could forcefully establish languages of transaction, not unlike today’s globalization and informationalization through the medium of English. Aramaic became the enforced mode of speech and writing for those under the control of the Persian Empire and the Inca managed to spread the Quechua language throughout the Western half of the South American continent. The expansionist compulsions of historical states and empires may stem originally from their commercial transactions and ‘hearts and minds’—and purses-have historically been won before conflict and conquest ever enter the picture, suggesting that the corporate and national ‘tyranny’ of flows that is implicit in globalization processes today are not new. Finally, that great postmodern concept that, for Castells, operates to balance and challenge information technology, ‘cultural identity’ as opposed to the ‘individualization of identity’ of the network society, is inextricably embedded in the past as he readily admits: ‘A cultural community, organized around language and a shared history…is not an imagined entity, but a constantly renewed historical product, even if nationalist movements construct/reconstruct their icons of self-identification with codes specific to each historical context, and relative to their political projects’ (Castells 1997: 49-50). People are conscious of their past before they become conscious of their collective or individual identities and, logically, it is that past which is used to construct and legitimate those identities. Many scholars will be understandably suspicious of what may appear to them to be a hyperdiffusionist perspective inherent in the papers here. For a vital connector between Castells’ theories and modern archaeology the contributors have turned to the great French historian Fernand Braudel and in particular Braudel’s first major work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Phillip II. First of all, cognitive history and archaeology have made great use of one important Annales concept-mentalités (mentalities). The suggestion that historical cultures, societies and people can only be considered in the context of their contemporaries-and not as viewed in relation to moderns-is not unique to this school, but it is in the application of mentalities that cognitive archaeologists have made their mark. For example, there are similarities at the outset between the Annales historical school represented by Braudel and others and the work of today’s archaeology with its recent emphasis on region, landscape and gradual processes. Braudel’s concept of time is sufficiently different from that of traditional historians to make it particularly functional forFigure 1.1 Hong Kong, China, 19th-century church amid modern skyscrapers. archaeologists who seldom deal with events and often deal with spans of time totaling a century or more. Braudel defines three types of historical time-événements (events), moyenne durée (medium duration) and longue durée (long duration). Although dividing history into short-, medium-and longterm processes hardly qualifies as revolutionary, the Annales concept of time is more complex than it first appears. At the short-term level of historical events, chance occurrences and individual men and women comprise what Braudel viewed as the traditional approach to history. He played down the importance of this level, seeing events and individuals as the ‘ephemera’ or ‘trivia’ of the past, as the following passage illustrates:When I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long term always wins in the end (Braudel 1972:244)
